Take a look beneath the Surface...
MICROSOFT’S UNCONVENTIONAL LAPTOP PUSHES THE BOUNDARIES
THE new Surface Laptop Studio is remarkable, both for its innovative design and for the fact this design has come from, of all people, Microsoft.
It’s amazing to me that the grand old veteran of tech is doing things like this in 2022, pushing boundaries and trying out new concepts and ideas.
And bringing them to market. The Laptop Studio is, on the face of it, a notebook computer… and a very capable one at that.
There are options where the processor is concerned – you’re looking at various combinations of Intel’s Core i5 or i7 chips and Intel’s Iris X or Nvidia’s GeForce RTX graphics chips, with storage configurable up to a 2TB SSD.
That’s all good – it will certainly sit happily on your desktop and plough through all but the most demanding of tasks with ease.
If you’re looking to do a lot of video editing, or play games with cutting-edge graphics, you might be a little disappointed. Streaming via Xbox PC Game Pass will mitigate the latter issue, though.
Battery life is decent – we’re looking at somewhere in the region of 10 hours of basic computing – webbrowsing, watching video, email… that kind of thing.
Push it harder, though, and that drops considerably. Still, it’s certainly not at the back of the queue when it comes to stamina.
So far, so boring, you might think. Until you grab the screen in
‘laptop mode’ and pull it forward – the whole thing hinges from the middle, with the bottom edge attaching magnetically to the base between the keyboard and trackpad…
Why would you want to do that, you ask? It is called ‘stage mode’ and angles the screen perfectly for watching video or video calling. Control remains available via the trackpad.
But there’s more. Pull the screen out further and it folds flat against the keyboard into ‘studio mode’, perfect for drawing.
For this you’ll need the Surface Pen 2, which is a £120 add-on that you’ll most certainly need with the Laptop Studio – it’s so essential that it’s odd it’s not included. The ‘studio mode’ really extends the utility of the machine, though, and is great for all kinds of design tasks.
It comes into its own when paired with an external monitor, where the Laptop Studio can act as a control surface in a very flexible and powerful set-up.
The Pen 2 is great – haptic feedback attempts to make it feel like you are writing on paper when working on the screen… and it’s uncanny.
The Laptop Studio is a very flexible machine for those who need the options – if you’re not going to be using the Pen, though, one of its main USPs becomes more or less obsolete.
It’s also on the pricier side, starting at £1,449 and rising to almost twice that for the top-spec machine with the most storage.
Whether this offers good value for you will most certainly depend on how much you’ll use the various modes – if you think you’ll use them all a lot, then this might be the laptop for you.
Find out more at microsoft.com